Local SEO Checklist: Boost Your Local Business SEO for 2018

The importance of optimizing your business for local search has grown significantly in the last two years. More and more people are using their mobile devices to search for local businesses online.

By optimizing your website for Local SEO, you can help your business stand out in search engine result pages (SERPs) and help attract new customers to your business.

But what is local SEO? And what differentiates local SEO from traditional SEO?

Moz defines local SEO as follows:

“Local SEO is specialized online marketing that increases visibility for businesses interested in ranking for geographically related keywords. A large component of local SEO is ranking well in the local algorithms. It is also important to rank well in the organic results for local keywords.”

One of the main differences between local SEO and traditional SEO is how you target customers. Location of the searcher plays a key factor in local SEO. Therefore, you must keep geography in mind while optimizing your website for local SEO.

If your website doesn’t show up when people search for your keywords in your location, you could be losing out on a lot of potential customers. Local SEO can fix this problem for you. It takes time and effort to optimize your website for local SEO, but it’s completely worth it.

Here’s a complete local SEO checklist to help you get started with local SEO.

Perform weekly site audits using tools such as SEMrush or Serpstat to fix all SEO errors.

Local SEO: Customer Reviews and Ratings

Customer reviews play an important role in local SEO. It’s important to monitor the online reviews for your business. If you operate in a niche that gets few reviews, then you know one or two reviews can ruin your company’s reputation. Reviews and ratings can also reward your website with additional traffic.

Have testimonials from your existing customers published on your website.

If your business already has a GMB listing, ask your existing customers to post reviews and ratings on Google. These reviews will show up in the SERPs when someone searches for your business on Google.

Local SEO: Content

High-quality content attracts high-quality backlinks and improves your search rankings. Content and backlinks are two most important ranking factors on google. Therefore, it’s necessary that you have a local content strategy for your website.

Make sure your most important content is featured on, or at least linked to, the home page.

Write blog posts on topics that apply to a certain demographic or location.

Local SEO: Social Media

Using social media to build local brand awareness is critical if you want to have an advantage over your local competitors. Follow these guidelines below to make sure your social media business pages are optimized for local SEO.

Create a solid presence on all the popular social media channels.

Claim a profile for your business on every major social media platform.

Local SEO: Citations

Citations are complete or partial references to your name, address, phone number or website (NAP+W) anywhere on the web. Businesses with greater number of citations tend to rank higher in SERPs than businesses with fewer citations. Local citations are also important to validate that a business is part of a community.

Manual citations: Manual citations take time and effort, but ultimately you have more control over your business listings. To learn more about manual citations, check out this guide from Moz.

Automated citations: Automated citations can help you save time and effort. The main drawback of automated citations is that not all services are of equal quality and you have less control over your business listings.

Make basic duplicate listing detection on a variety of platforms easier with the use of a free tool like Moz Check Listing.

Conclusion

Local SEO has several elements that are different from traditional SEO. Now that you have a local SEO checklist, you can start optimizing your website for local SEO and reach out to new local customers.

You can also get a PDF copy of this local SEO checklist below.

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Sandeep Mallya is the Founder/CEO of Startup Cafe, a Bangalore-based digital marketing agency. He is an active member of the startup community, having worked with several early-stage startups and accelerators. 99signals is Sandeep's inbound marketing blog. Here you can find tips and insights to grow your site's traffic.

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About Me

Hi there, I’m Sandeep Mallya!

I’m an entrepreneur and digital marketing consultant from Bangalore, India. I founded my own digital agency, Startup Cafe Digital, in 2015 where I help SMBs leverage social media, SEO, and content marketing to grow their traffic and generate qualified leads for their business.

I started 99signals in 2016 as a side project to document all the strategies, tools, and tactics that I was using to grow my small agency. The goal was simple: to arm other solopreneurs with all the right information they needed to launch a successful business.

ABOUT ME

Hi there, I’m Sandeep Mallya!

I’m an entrepreneur and digital marketing consultant from Bangalore, India. I founded my own digital agency, Startup Cafe Digital, in 2015 where I help SMBs leverage social media, SEO, and content marketing to grow their traffic and generate qualified leads for their business.

I started 99signals in 2016 as a side project to document all the strategies, tools, and tactics that I was using to grow my small agency. The goal was simple: to arm other solopreneurs with all the right information they needed to launch a successful business.

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99signals is a marketing blog run by me, Sandeep Mallya, to help bloggers and entrepreneurs run a successful side business and earn extra income through blogging and affiliate marketing.